Frankie Rose was having a hard time sleeping when she moved to Los Angeles from Brooklyn. In an attempt to ease her anxiety, she started listening to a lot of Art Bell’s radio show “Midnight in the Desert,” which is a prime late-night source for the paranormal and the conspiratorial.
Rose’s latest album, “Cage Tropical,” is brimming with the otherworldly -- so much so that her music video for single “Trouble” is a geometrical time-warp of an infomercial for a UFO sighting hotline (which is 575-347-1388, by the way) based out of Roswell, New Mexico.
“Every record I make is sort of a time capsule of what’s going on when I’m making it. It’s a weird snapshot or view of what’s happening,” Rose told me over the phone last month.
Although she grew up in Los Angeles, she moved to San Francisco for 10 years and then New York after that, but she still found herself trying to outrun the trouble in her heart. So, she moved back to Los Angeles where she wrote her new record -- but that lasted only 18 months.
“Southern California has never been for me. I’m more of an East Coast kind of gal … But I think it’s easy for people to say, ‘I’m gonna change my external circumstances and that will change my internal circumstances.’ The whole album is kind of about that,” Rose said before complimenting my “SoCal accent.”
Listen to "Cage Tropical," Rose's jangling, buzzing new album below.
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Earlier in her career, Rose was part of Kristin Welchez’s (a fellow SoCal-turned-Brooklynite musician) Dum Dum Girls. They met back during MySpace’s glory days when “you just looked at other people who were in your network.”
“I found her music on MySpace; she was very mysterious and had a picture who wasn’t her. I was just like, ‘I’d love to play drums for you,’” Rose explained regarding the origin of hers and Welchez’s collaborative relationship.
These days, Welchez’s in Mexico City with husband and Crocodiles frontman Brandon Welchez, and Rose is preoccupied with her own projects. While she has yet to have paranormal experiences herself, she has a few friends who have seen UFOs. So, she’s taking her interest in the subject to the next level with the launching of a podcast called “Weird Night With Juan & Frankie” that will focus on the connection between music and the paranormal.
She'll make a believer out of you yet.
Frankie Rose plays Soda Bar on Saturday, Sept. 23. Get tickets here.
Rutger Rosenborg was almost a Stanford neuroscientist before he formed Ed Ghost Tucker. Whoops. He now plays in the Lulls and makes music on his own when he's not writing. Follow his updates on Facebook or contact him directly.
